90 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



of forces in which fish and ant and tree play their 

 unwitting roles. True again that further analysis 

 shows that the methods of evolutionary progress are 

 often crude, wasteful, and slow: that some of our 

 values are unreal or artificial: but this does not de- 

 stroy the main fact, and only means that each side 

 can here learn something from the other. 



The main fact abides — that progress is an evolu- 

 tionary reality, and that an analysis of the modes of 

 biological progress may often help us in our quest 

 for human progress. 



The next great problem on which biology has 

 something to say to sociology is that eternal one of 

 the relation between individual and community. As 

 it is sometimes put, Does the individual exist for the 

 State, or the State for the individual? In all non- 

 human biological aggregates — cell-colonies, second- 

 grade aggregates or metazoan organisms, third-grade 

 aggregates like Siphonophora and insect communities 

 — the very existence of the aggregate as a unit, its 

 biological efficiency and success, depend upon a per- 

 manent division of labour between its members, 

 upon their thoroughgoing specialization. This al- 

 ways and inevitably involves a sacrifice of certain of 

 their potentialities to greater efficiency in one of a 

 few actual functions, and in evolution a progressive 

 subordination of the smaller unit to the aggregate. 



At first sight, biological principles seem to con- 

 tradict themselves on this subject. On the one hand, 

 the human individual is, or, we had better say, has 



